Description

The zthread class wraps OS thread creation. It creates detached threads that look like normal OS threads, or attached threads that share the caller's ØMQ context, and get an inproc pipe to talk back to the parent thread. Detached threads create their own ØMQ contexts as needed.

We have several use cases for multiple threads. One is to simulate many processes, so we can test ØMQ designs and flows more easily. Another is to create APIs that can send and receive ØMQ messages in the background.

zthread solves these two use cases separately, using the zthread_new and zthead_fork methods respectively. These methods wrap the native system calls needed to start threads, so your code can remain fully portable.

Attached thread receive a void * argument, a zctx_t context, and a pipe socket. The pipe socket is a PAIR socket that is connected back to the caller. When you call zthread_fork, it returns you a PAIR socket that is the other end of this pipe. Thus attached threads can talk back to their parent threads over the pipe. We use this very heavily when making so-called "asynchronous" APIs, which you can see in the Guide examples like clone.

To recap some rules about threading: do not share sockets between threads or your code will crash. You can migrate a socket from one thread to a child thread, if you stop using it in the parent thread immediately after creating the child thread. If you want to connect sockets over inproc:// they must share the same ØMQ context, i.e. be attached threads. You should always use zthread_fork to create an attached thread; it is not sufficient to pass a zctx_t structure to a detached thread (this will crash).

If you want to communicate over ipc:// or tcp:// you may be sharing the same context, or use separate contexts. Thus, every detached thread usually starts by creating its own zctx_t instance.

See also

Authors

The CZMQ manual was written by Pieter Hintjens<moc.xitami|hp#moc.xitami|hp>.

Resources

Main web site: http://czmq.zeromq.org/

Report bugs to the ØMQ development mailing list: <gro.qmorez.stsil|ved-qmorez#gro.qmorez.stsil|ved-qmorez>

Copyright

Copyright (c) 1991-2014 iMatix and Contributors. License LGPLv3+: GNU LGPL 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/lgpl.html>. This is free software: you are free to change it and redistribute it. There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law. For details see the files COPYING and COPYING.LESSER included with the CZMQ distribution.